• Question: Were you ever surprised by a project and its results the most?

    Asked by anon-40078 on 8 Nov 2022.
    • Photo: Lyndsey Moore

      Lyndsey Moore answered on 8 Nov 2022:


      All the time! Part of the fun of science is developing your research question and hypothesis then testing it. The surprising results are usually the most interesting.

    • Photo: Vincent Monchal

      Vincent Monchal answered on 8 Nov 2022:


      Yes, for my PhD I was supposed to get rocks that were 300 million years old, turns out that they were bearing a much younger age around 35 million years

    • Photo: Vanessa Rodrigues

      Vanessa Rodrigues answered on 9 Nov 2022:


      This happens a lot of the time and that is part of why I became a scientist. We like to discover the unknown. We set up a project with a certain idea in mind. And then we find something extra or different when we experiment.

    • Photo: Ciara Buckley

      Ciara Buckley answered on 9 Nov 2022:


      Absolutely, my project plan four years ago looked very different to how it turned out. Thats part of being a scientist, letting the results guide you.

    • Photo: Sean O'Halloran

      Sean O'Halloran answered on 9 Nov 2022:


      YES! I had made a reaction that I thought I knew completely how and why it could go wrong. Then I had my student try it.. It was supposed to be orange but it turned red, then green, then blue and finally stopped at purple. I still have no idea why!!

    • Photo: Ingmar Schoen

      Ingmar Schoen answered on 9 Nov 2022:


      In the end the results always made sense but they were not necessarily what I was expecting when I started the project, so it is important to look at results with an open mind and revise the picture that you have in your head while you progress. This said, the most surprising result I got was during my master project, probably also because I was still very naive back then.

    • Photo: Anna Desmond

      Anna Desmond answered on 9 Nov 2022:


      Yes, all the time. You can try and guess what you think might happen but you never know what the result is going to be. Once I was trying to find a new antibiotic to kill bacteria and it wasn’t working. I decided to do one last experiment with different bacteria and it worked.

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